A post by Matt made me aware of a page about Productivity and information management features in the latest and exciting installment of Microsoft™'s acclaimed Operating™ System™ - Windows™ Vista™.

Matt picked out a few features that he found particularly compelling, and I've picked out my own.

Internet Explorer

Windows Vista includes major enhancements to Internet Explorer. In addition to the security and privacy features and enhancements, Windows Vista Internet Explorer Beta 1 offers an early glimpse of how Microsoft is redesigning Internet Explorer to make everyday tasks easier—for instance, with tabbed browsing, inline search, and shrink-to-fit printing. It also provides new tools to give you direct access to the information you want with built-in support for Web Feeds (also known as RSS, or Really Simple Syndication). Windows Vista Internet Explorer also delivers a simplified and updated user interface, as well as improvements to the platform for Web developers.

Tabbed browsing, inline search, and shrink-to-fit printing, the ability to read RSS feeds directly in your browser? IE7 is sure to leave Firefox in the dust.

Web improvements

Windows Vista includes some commonly requested improvements that provide a rich and flexible platform for Web developers—for example, transparent Portable Network Graphics (PNG), which lets Web designers create compelling overlaid page designs.

Good that Microsoft™ continues its commitment to the latest web standards.

Metro documents

Knowledge workers can securely collaborate by using a new, easy-to-create, XML-based, fixed-format document, code-named "Metro" This format can be created directly from any application, and is simply a page-by-page view of content as it would have been rendered by a printer. Metro documents retain all of the fidelity of the original source material and all the necessary resources such as fonts and images for rendering. In Windows Vista Beta 1, Metro documents do not require you to have the original authoring application to be viewed, but are instead viewable within the included Metro Viewer, which is hosted by Internet Explorer 7 on any Windows Vista computer with the WinFX runtime APIs installed. The Metro viewer can also be hosted by Windows XP computers with Internet Explorer 6, but likewise, WinFX must be installed. While the Metro document format is ideal for sharing content in an application-independent way, it is also an ideal archival format as well. Microsoft is freely licensing Metro, which means that the format can be created and consumed on many different platforms and classes of devices, ensuring that Metro documents will integrate well.

Yet more keen innovation. Imagine, being able to print to a file, and then sharing that file with the people that you work with. With wide cross-platform support, and cunning use of XML, this is sure to catch on.

I think you'll all agree that Open Source can never compete with the powerful development force of Microsoft™

I was reading this morning that there has been research that indicates that coffee is good for you. This is obvously something that I've suspected for a long time.. :D

If you read down to the benefits listed in the article, you'll see that among other things, it seems to reduce the risk of liver cirrhosis.

It's 11am on Saturday morning, I can feel a hangover setting in, and I'm off out again in a couple of hours to drink more.

Last night was an unofficial work night out, organised to recitfy the fact that we'd not been on a night out for a while, and perhaps a little because we've just moved office - which wasn't too painful.. I still have my evil genius chair, and dual 20.1" TFTs, so all is well. The new building is good - although there seem to be more stairs to climb :/

Cat and I got the keys to our flat on the 27th. Cat moves in properly next week, with me following when I get my finger out and shift some stuff across, and sort out internet. A good start would be to phone BT and have them turn the phone line on - something with I was planning to do by now. Yay for procrastination - which many would probably say is how I spend most of my time..

This morning I did something that I've been itching to do for months now. I ordered a phone upgrade from T-Mobile. Woo hoo. A sparkly new Nokia 6230i will be arriving shortly, and the postman will (without attempting to knock) take it back to the Royal Mail sorting office, where I'll have to get up early to go and get it. I don't mind though - my thirst for new gadgets will be partially quenched.

I've been invited through to Edinburgh, for a couple of what might perhaps be alcoholic beverages of some kind, by my flatmate from a few years ago (3!?) - Colin. I'm expecting anything, and leaving my Visa card in Glasgow. If I still have the ability to type when I return, I'll maybe share the experience.

It's been a while since I last posted, but it doesn't feel like it.. The weeks have been flying by recently, perhaps i'm getting old.. :/

The main consumer of my time outside work recently has been GTA: San Andreas, which was released for the PC (Windows - bah) on the 10th. Having preordered my copy from Play last month, I received my copy on the 9th. The basic gameplay is similar to GTA3, and Vice City. You run around, pick up guns, steal cars, run people over, crash, burn, and basically cause havoc. Rockstar have added much more detail than in the previous incarnations of the game. The game world is HUGE compared to Vice City, and those annoying area transition screens are gone. You can also choose how your character will look - if you eat lots of junk food you get fat, if you go to the gym and do lots of weights you build up muscles. You can choose your clothes and haircut too. If anyone enjoyed GTA3 or Vice City, and hasn't bought San Andreas yet, i'd recommend that you waste no more time.

Things have been going well at work, and despite having to force myself out of bad in the mornings, MS Word being the most horrific piece of software conceived, and a certain e-Commerce site being the bane of my existence, I'm enjoying the variety in the projects i'm working on. So far I've played with managed DirectX (C#/MS SQL Server), converted Word documents to PDF using wvWare and LaTeX (C), debugged and repaired chunks of LiteCommerce (PHP/MySQL), started work on a tool to help with a large web localisation project (Java/MySQL), and started work on a Content Management System that will run several sites that we will be building soon (PHP/MySQL/Smarty). An aspect that I especially like is that within the bounds of practicality, I get to choose what I use to implement stuff. It's also quite satisfying to be paid for doing something that I enjoy.

Following on from idea of getting old, Cat and I are looking to rent a flat together. If anyone knows of flats going in the West End (Glasgow) around August/September time, let me know.

I'm off to play some more San Andreas before bed. Mmm GTA.

I was procrastinating at work yesterday, and came across a link to this on Slahdot. Going up one level from that URI takes you to a page with some more stuff. Mm stuff. I liked the page of Bart Simpson blackboard quotes, but the best that I've found so far is this page about how to shoot yourself in the foot in different programming languages.

Here's one of the better ones:

Unix
% ls
foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o
% rm * .o
rm: .o: No such file or directory
% ls
%

I also like the Ada one.

Update:

This page is also worth a look.. :)